[Bug 28193] New: wineconsole does not support RTL locales

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28193

Summary: wineconsole does not support RTL locales
           Product: Wine
           Version: 1.3.26
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: programs
        AssignedTo: [e-mail]
        ReportedBy: [e-mail]

I am entering this bug on behalf of Yaron Shahrabani because I did not find any
other bug describing this issue.

So the issue is that wineconsole does not support the RTL languages such as
Hebrew and Arabic. To test this do the following:
 * xcopy is a tool that is Unicodified and properly accesses the console. So we
are going to use it for testing.

* Make sure your system is configured with support for the Hebrew locale
('dpkg-reconfigure locales' on Debian).

* Hack po/he.po to add a Hebrew string with a trailing '.\n' for the xcopy
usage message (it does not matter what it says).

* Recompile xcopy.

* First check that 'xcopy /?' shows the right string, very likely with the
wrong orientation, in the terminal emulator:
     LANG=he_IL.utf8 ./wine programs/xcopy/xcopy.exe.so /?

If it still shows the English usage it may be because you are missing
libgettextpo. Other display issues may be because you are missing the right
fonts or because your terminal emulator is buggy (Gnome terminal >= 3.0.1 and
xterm >= 271 should show the string at least).
   Remember that the Unix terminal emulators are known to have a buggy RTL
implementation and thus will display the message with the wrong orientation.

* Then check that the right string shows up in wineconsole:
     LANG=he_IL.utf8 ./wine wineconsole cmd
   then type
      xcopy /?

In my test the line where the Hebrew string should appear is almost empty (I
only see the '32' and trailing '.' that were part of the translated string).

It's possible there are two problems:
 * A font selection issue which could explain the 'invisible' characters.
 * An LTR vs. RTL issue: the '.' at the end of the PO string appears at the end
of the wineconsole line which seems wrong since the same dot appears at the
start of the line in a MessageBox().

The same test can be done with an Arabic locale by editing the po/ar.po file
and setting LANG=ar_MA.utf8 for instance.

As a last data point, a similar test with the left-to-right Telugu locale
(LANG=te_IN.utf8, po/te.po) gets me squares in the Gnome terminal (proving my
system has a font issue for that locale), but also in wineconsole. So unlike
for Hebrew I did not get 'invisible characters'.